Tikolm wrote:Benny is doing something I haven't seen a lot, which is to just stick the verb for "do" onto whatever word you want to be a verb.

This is called a light verb construction and they're not uncommon. Korean and Japanese, for instance, make extensive use of them.

Tikolm wrote:About the "English cypher" issue -- there's nothing whatever wrong with creating a language that's this obviously based on English, but some people can be real purists and will shoot down this type of project because it's not "creative" enough. This may or may not be true, and opinions vary, but it's usually best not to come right out and say "your language is nothing but an English cypher with deliberately obtuse spelling" or anything along those lines. If someone wants to create an English cypher, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, my most developed and favorite conlang (Tikolmian) is nothing but encoded, somewhat spiced up English with a culture of its own.

There's nothing wrong with it, but there's also nothing wrong with holding would-be conlangers to a higher standard. Calling such a project a "conlang" trivialises the hard work of those who have built up substantial new languages of their own. A cypher-conlang of your native language is the work of half a minute. Let me demonstrate: Çes es meï neü konlaġ. Ônt ʒy emprist? Ʒy ¢od bï! Eï spiant ă huul menet-n-ă-hof on't!

Tikolm wrote:Pur la gonell, ne zer se ddiscysion a ren. Arest de aler dan dill zircli.Genglish verbs don't appear to be exactly "nothing like English", but they are different, interesting and worthwhile. Benny is doing something I haven't seen a lot, which is to just stick the verb for "do" onto whatever word you want to be a verb. The only real-world example I know of of a real-world language that does this is Dutch (open- + doen "do" = opendoen, "to open") but even there it's not universal. One side effect of this is that all the verbs will be regular this way because, essentially, they're all the same verb with different prefixes.A small nit -- "buukti" looks like it should mean, literally, to read [only] books. Has it undergone a meaning shift to refer to other kinds of reading, or does it really only refer to reading books? You may not have thought this out, but it would make things more interesting if you could. Along the same lines, as you may know, there are kinds of "paying" that don't involve money and having the only verb for "pay" be derived from "money" indicates that the underlying concept of paying in the Genglish culture is tightly tied up with money.I hope that made sense and wasn't offensive. By the way, if you really want to know how to make a language that's nothing like English (or whatever), here's an excellent (in my opinion) set of resources on it: The Language Construction Kit.About the "English cypher" issue -- there's nothing whatever wrong with creating a language that's this obviously based on English, but some people can be real purists and will shoot down this type of project because it's not "creative" enough. This may or may not be true, and opinions vary, but it's usually best not to come right out and say "your language is nothing but an English cypher with deliberately obtuse spelling" or anything along those lines. If someone wants to create an English cypher, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, my most developed and favorite conlang (Tikolmian) is nothing but encoded, somewhat spiced up English with a culture of its own.

Thank you so much for the help and advise. Also, I am not offended in any way. =)

Oh, and by the way, this took about an hour to get all the sounds worked out. =)

That's all right, I don't (totally) know it either for the same reason (in my case, too hard to find a source of IPA characters that I'm not too lazy to use. ) You can use X-SAMPA instead, it's a lot easier -- both to type and to remember. I've probably already given you this link, but I'm pushing it at you again because it's really worth giving proper transcriptions of your phonemes -- both for being understood and gaining respect.Myaw mikyo!

That's all right, I don't (totally) know it either for the same reason (in my case, too hard to find a source of IPA characters that I'm not too lazy to use. :P)

They're right there in your Character Map. It's the work of a moment to cut and paste them.

I can see how this would be a pain if you were rendering whole passages in IPA. But most people only need the characters for a phoneme inventory.

Tikolm wrote:You can use X-SAMPA instead, it's a lot easier -- both to type and to remember.

There's almost a one-to-one correspondence between X-SAMPA and IPA and many X-SAMPA renderings were specifically chosen because of their visual resemblance to IPA characters. So it's interesting to hear that you find X-SAMPA easier to learn, since I have the opposite problem. (For instance, it took me a long time to get used to the fact that X-SAMPA [&] is equivalent IPA [ɶ] rather than IPA [æ]. X-SAMPA [{] for IPA [æ] is completely non-intuitive to me--and way too easily confused with [}] for [ʉ].)

linguoboy wrote:This is called a light verb construction and they're not uncommon. Korean and Japanese, for instance, make extensive use of them.

Thank you.

There's nothing wrong with it, but there's also nothing wrong with holding would-be conlangers to a higher standard. Calling such a project a "conlang" trivialises the hard work of those who have built up substantial new languages of their own. A cypher-conlang of your native language is the work of half a minute. Let me demonstrate: Çes es meï neü konlaġ. Ônt ʒy emprist? Ʒy ¢od bï! Eï spiant ă huul menet-n-ă-hof on't!

I see what you mean, but -- "This is my new conlang. Aren't you impressed? You should be! I spent a whole minute-and-a-half on it!" Excuse me? You may not know how long Benny spent in total making this conlang, but you do know he spent an hour on the sounds. My point was, e-dy yn pw empoli gon regar â le ganglês. If your point is that Genglish shouldn't in your opinion be called a conlang, just say so instead of going on about how the spelling is "deliberately obscure" and wishing Benny "better luck next time" (which I assume is somewhat sarcastic in tone). And, after all, it's your opinion that Genglish isn't a conlang, so you might want to state that too. What I would have said, in your position, would have been something to the effect of "I wouldn't really consider this to be a conlang, so it doesn't strike me as appropriate to refer to it as such on here until you've distanced it from English some more."(Okay, it's also my opinion that Genglish doesn't exactly have full conlang status and that its orthography is somewhat obscure. But I wouldn't have just come right out and said that if it hadn't been for you!)

linguoboy wrote:They're right there in your Character Map. It's the work of a moment to cut and paste them.

I know. I recently found this out, and I will be taking full advantage of it. With regard to the IPA/X-SAMPA issue, I take back what I said about ease of remembering. I wasn't sure of it in the first place anyway and I don't know why I said that.